Garage Doors – The Story Behind

Nowadays, a garage plays increasing role to many households. It is no longer merely a place to park a car. Rather, garage door has more functions to complete and even complement our home living. It it serves as the front door for many families. Thereby, you may offset from your garage doors as starting point.

Garage doors have their own long stories and history that will include numerous innovations as well as adaptations in which as a result today’s home and business owners are given with a great deal of choices when selecting and deciding the faultless ones.

Those long lines of inventions and modifications can be witnessed from many ups and downs, as well as twists and turns in the history of garage doors.

When the first wheels appeared

Indeed, the history of garage doors can be dated back thousands of years, approximately to 3500 BC or possibly even earlier. More especially when the first wheels created. Ever since wheels were used for means of transportation, and as a consequence people began to look for places for parking their vehicles.

During those ancient times, people used the city and town gatehouses as the initial vehicle storage spaces. Later, in the 18th and 19th centuries, carriage houses started to serve as storage as well. In many colonial America places, those carriage houses were usually rarely attached to homes, therefore the home owners had to walk through some conditions to get their carriages.

The portrayal of those carriage houses weren’t much more than barns, covered by dirt floors, simple walls, and gates which functioned as the doors. These doors hung from hinges and swung outward-bound. In order to avoid drooping, they themselves were designed in Z- and X-shaped which aimed to strengthen the doors and distribute their weight.

JST Barn, T Jones Carriage Trimmer

When cars appeared

The era of horses and carriages ended when cars appeared. At the end of the 1800s, cars slowly started replacing those predecessor means of transportation. And by the early 1900s, thanks to Henry Ford, cars began to flourish. This caused a new problem for storage. What-so-called garages set about to slowly emerge.

In fact, the term garage itself initially appeared in the English dictionary in 1902. It was originally derived form the French term “garer,” which has meaning shelter or cover (Amazines).

The reason why the earliest cars required shelter first because they were open, or they physically weren’t designed with roofs. Next, early cars were also dearly pricey, thus the proprietors didn’t wish their cars to get soaked in a rainstorm or filled with snow. Due to those circumstances, many car owners stored them in barns or other existing constructions.

Moreover, especially in urban areas without those kinds of structures, large, private garages were emerging. The owners had to pay a charge of monthly fee. Yet, still private garages weren’t considered and proven as a perfect solution.

Shortly cars became increasingly widespread. The the private, fee-based garages indeed began to overflow, yet automobile owners also started to notice their weaknesses. As an example, it was such a nuisance for you to get to your car in a private garage because you had to walk or find other transportation to get there in the first place.

Private, Fee-Based Garage

Personal Garages

The time for personal garages began to come into existence due to those shortcomings posed by private, fee-based garages. To name some of the innovations was when the Sears Roebuck catalog offered what-so-called portable garages and mail-order garage kits. And, the Sweet’s Catalogue came with the first upward operation garage doors in 1906.

Initial garage doors looked a lot like carriage house doors. They were designed with swing-out doors that unfortunately posed a problem when it was snowing or otherwise blocked, because you wouldn’t be able to open the doors. These carriage house-style doors wore down promptly and needed regular substitution.

Sectional doors before long came out as a solution to those problems.

In 1921, C.G. Johnson invented the garage door attributed with overhead operation. This was the first overhead garage door created. Johnson took advantage of another new innovation when he created the first electric garage door in 1926.

Architects started designing homes with attached garages by the halfway of the 20th century. They created garages as favorable as possible which enabling the homeowners to access their vehicles without having to step out into any circumstance or weather condition.

It was after World War II when cars increasingly grew larger and larger, and many households began to have two vehicles or even more. As a result, garages also grew to accommodate multiple larger vehicles. And by the 1960s, the garage represented roughly 45 percent of a residence’s square footage.

Through most of the 20th century, garage doors were built from wood. The 1970s brought forward a change in the materials, such as steel, aluminum, fiberglass and other materials. These new materials led to today’s unmatched selections of composite materials with synthetic insulation. For more contemporary home livings, aluminum and glass garage doors are also gaining more popularity.

Overhead Garage Door

Garage doors with sensors

It was until the 1980s when garage doors did not retract when they happened came into contact with something. This, of course, created unfortunately a costly mistake if a car was left parked under a door. Also, it caused a dangerous fault if the door closed on a child or pet. Therefore, a nationwide law passed in the 1990s that obligated garage doors featuring sensors. These sensors are going to signal garage doors to shrink back if they came into contact with an object before reaching the threshold.

Garage Door Sensor

Something beyond simple storage

Surprisingly and interestingly, many today’s homeowners are now looking for carriage house-style garage doors that offer the comfort of upward operation. Just about 80 percent of homes today are designed at least with a single-car garage, and almost 20 percent of newly constructed homes featuring three-car garages. As stated earlier, granted with that convenience, a garage serves as the front door for many families.

A garage is so much more than just a place to park a car. There’s also an implication beyond vehicle storage. Approximately 85 percent of house owners make the use of their garages for something more than simply a vehicle storage. Some great examples can be taken from many modern corporations like Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Google and Amazon (retireat21). The similarity between them is that they initially started in garages!